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I tend to be doubtful about the statement RE the Best Saga/Series category that there wouldn't be enough potential nominees. I, a single author, ended one such series a couple years ago (Boundary series), will end a second next year (Balanced Sword), and a third the year after that (Arenaverse). I find it hard to believe that as a single part-time author I am so unusual that there wouldn't be at least ten and possibly dozens of candidates every year, out of the thousands of books published both by traditional and other means.

Personally, I prefer Eric Flint's suggestion RE changing the award structure, but as I'm not ever going to be at a Worldcon unless it's nearby or I am on the Hugo shortlist somehow, my preferences won't really matter.

For me the killer argument is that no reader can be expected to read five complete (or almost complete) sagas between nominations and awards. Also, under the current system both parts of sagas and sagas as a whole get nominated and sometimes win. So I don't perceive a problem that needs to be fixed in this way.

Yeah, but I'm not comparing short stories to novels, and if it's okay to have novels with an order of magnitude difference as separate categories compared to short stories, I'm not clear that series are inherently out of the running. (I'm not in favor of eliminating short story award categories, although the significance of short stories today compared to their heyday is really way down).

Also, there's nothing preventing a "no award". Or make it once every two years, or something. (once every ten, no, that's REALLY gonna kill anyone whose series ended more than five years back.)

I actually wonder about that. There are so many novels being pumped out by publishing houses these days, while there are a limited number of magazines each publishing a couple of dozen stories per year at best. I'd be interested to see a systematic count. My suspicion, based on no evidence whatsoever, is that the difference in magnitude may not be all that great.

I would expect that there are more short stories, but also that there's a lot more BLURRING of the lines, especially if you take into account self-publishing and other purely electronic venues where someone may be regularly publishing stuff between 30-50k words, running over that border all the time.